Dolls

My third film at the festival was my first Takeshi Kitano film: Dolls. A recurring theme in my posts (see here – and here) has been the difficulty with reviewing fiction, and I’ll have to repeat myself: it’s particularly true for this film.

As a film critic, you can talk about various aspects of a film, such as its structure, the narrative techniques, the visual techniques, the actors’ performances, the script, and so on – but you can’t really convey the essence of the film; its whole. For that, your audience as a critic will have to go and see the film. Period.

As for Dolls, I can’t think of anything that could be said that would give you a sense of what it’s like. Sure, it’s visually beautiful, but I can’t describe it. The same goes for the story.

In my post yesterday about intuition (see here) I talked about the “floodlight” versus the “spotlight” consciousness. This is primarily a floodlight movie: if you try to think when you see it, you’ll get confused and perhaps bored. What you should do is to just breathe calmly and relax, turn off your rationality and watch.

If I understood my friend Olof correctly, this film makes you think of Hana-bi (also by Kitano). I’ll have to check out that one, and the rest of his films. As for the festival, I feel like I can skip the rest of the movies. After yesterday’s film, I thought that it would be unlikely for any of the four other films I’ve bought tickets to be good.

Go and see Dolls.